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Category Archives: art
never trust anyone who doesn’t read
we read and then we talk about it. it’s what we do.
chalky clouds and purple prose
Journal THAT
a guide to writing
Cynthia Gregory
There are good adjectives and bad adjectives. There are the regular, hard-working-show-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-but-go-unnoticed adjectives and then there are what I call the 25 cent adjectives. You know the kind, all flashy and shiny and bright, the kind you notice more than the noun that they’re describing. They’re like fast food; they temporarily distract you from the fact that there is nothing of substance behind them, they are the literary equivalent of a plate of whipped cream.
I know a lot about these razzle-dazzle kinds of describers, these peacocks of poetry. I used to scatter them around liberally, clever as I was. But what happened when I really got rolling, is that the point I was trying to make got totally buried under my ponderous prose. My meaning sagged under the weight of all that reckless description. My language got so pearly and polished that everything I wrote began to sound like a steaming, verdant jungle, packed with all the lush pomegranates, mangoes and papayas of meaning I could wedge in. I mean seriously, an old pair of scruffed sneakers with one broken lace is a perfectly respectable sort of description. But when I got done with it, those Keds sounded like Ritz Carlton glass slippers.
What happened when I began to excavate the core of my message, the humble meaning of my narrative began to emerge as I sliced away one fabulous phrase after another. Everyone knows by now the famous story of what Michaelango said when someone asked how he knew how to carve the statue of David – he said, “oh, I just got rid of what didn’t belong.” You need to do the same with your descriptive language. Pare it down, pare it the hell down. Make it lean and mean and dense. Never use a twenty-five cent word when a nickel will do.
Many people mistakenly think that a short story is easier to write than a novel, because it’s more compact. They think that a poem is even easier, because there are fewer words yet. But the exact opposite is true. Did you know that? The shorter the piece, the harder it is to write. This is because with fewer words, every one has to count. There is no room for extra padding, no place to hide. There are no long stretches of narrative, expeditions into expostulation. You have to say exactly what you mean. Every word, every verb, has to carry the weight of the sentence on its meager back, so it must be strong, and it must be absolutely true. The shorter the writing, the denser it becomes. Not dese heavy, just dense: full of meaning; ripe as a summer peach, juicy and succulent.
It’s easy to see why people fall in love with a flush of flabby, fatuous descriptions; because they mean nothing. We’re a TV culture after all, we’re used to that. Flamboyant descriptors are like a magician’s trick, a sleight of hand. Honest writing, writing from the heart, strips you naked. It’s much easier to hide your fragile heart behind a veil of words. But that takes no courage. If you want to journal, you must be brave. You must go into the room you’re afraid to enter and stay there until you have emptied yourself out. And the next day, you must go in there again. You can never completely empty yourself through journaling. There is always something more, something deeper, something rich and rare and precious because it comes from within you. It comes from a place beyond the glittery surface. It comes slick and dark and wet and you must love it. You must stay with it until your heart stops quaking in your chest and you must put it on the page, make it authentic. This is real courage. This is what true love is made of: entering into that place that terrifies you and staying there, listening, writing, watching, recording it all, until the quiet enters and the writing is complete.
Sometimes you will flow with a million thoughts, like droplets of water over Niagara Falls, and there is nothing wrong with that. I would like to suggest however, that there is a balance. If you can practice both ends of this particular writing scale, you will become a better writer. When you sit down to write, think simply. Don’t think you have to impress anyone, to show off. You have an audience of one, and its you.
Here is an exercise that will illustrate what I’m getting at. Sit with your journal and an orange, in a quiet place. Write for fifteen minutes describing the dimpled orb of fruit without using the word orange more than once. Go into that room and stay there. You can riff on the orange if you want, start with the fruit, talk about the blossom or the orchard, or the hands that harvested the one you hold in your hand, but Don’t use the word orange more than once in your description. You can use another fruit if you wish, but the same rules apply. So chose a plum, but don’t use purple. Or choose an apple, but don’t use red or green. You get the point. Hold yourself apart from using the descriptor that is most obvious, and what you get in return is a whole new way to relate to description in general.
Be objective, be a journalist. Pick up the newspaper and read an article about an event. Journalists use the fewest adjectives than just about any writer, and most of those are worth a nickel. They don’t say “it was a stunningly sunny day with chalky clouds dotting the horizon.” No, they say, “the day was warm, with scattered clouds.” Period. There is an elegance in that kind of simplicity. Practice being a journal-ist. Practice simplicity with your journal. And be patient with yourself. This stuff takes practice.
murky water with low visibility
OIL IN WATER
Pam Lazos
Chapter Forty-Three
Hart descended into the murky realms of the Delaware River, enjoying the cocoon-like warmth of his wet suit. He had opted for it over the dry suit even though the water was on its way to below freezing. The dry suit would keep him dry, but not warm enough, not in these arctic-like conditions. Ah, but the wet suit, that was a suit of a different color. It sported an insulated neoprene hose which tied onto the outside of the umbilical, ran down the side of his body and attached at the spider, a three-way valve at the waist of his suit. The hose was fed by a hot water machine that had an oil-fired burner and a digital thermostat to control the temperature. Under usual circumstances, water to feed the hose would be drawn from the water body the diver found himself in, but given the petrol load the Delaware was carrying, Hart directed the hot water machine be fed with water from a local fire hydrant and transported via garden hose. The hose was threaded around the interior of Hart’s wet suit and one hundred degree water escaped through the little holes poked in it, entering in myriad locations and keeping his whole body warm. The hose could even blow warm water through the cuff and into Hart’s smaller gloves making the large, bulky, but warmer three-finger gloves unnecessary. Hart closed his eyes, allowing himself to bask for a few moments in the warmth before proceeding down the ladder into the water.
The Delaware river, a murky water with low visibility on a good day, was even worse today because of the impending storm. Hart reached a level that he assumed would be the bottom of the ship’s hull, but without touching it he couldn’t distinguish metal from water. He dropped another few feet, holding fast to the traveling line, but the scenery didn’t change.
“Great. Now what?”
“What’s up, Boss?” Smith’s voice crackled through Hart’s umbilical flooding the inner chamber of his helmet with sound.
“I can’t see a damn thing. What are they puttin’ in this water anyway?”
“Lots of industry around here. Ships going up and down the channel churnin’ up the bottom. The Army Corps always dredging it to keep the depth right. Then there’s the farming,” Smith mused. “I’d say you got some sediment, some debris…”
“It was a rhetorical question, Smithy.”
“…and, I’d leave it at that. You don’t want to be thinking too hard about what you’re swimming in unless you want to puke in your helmet.” Smith cracked up at that, and Hart joined him, his body quivering with silent laughter.
“Smithy. Help me here. I can’t see the ship. It’s no where in sight, far as I can tell.” Hart flicked his headlamp on and off, looking to bounce the light off of something. He wrapped the tow rope around his leg before reaching his hands out in front of him, groping vainly in the darkness. “I got nothin’.”
“The traveling rope should be about three feet in front of the Ryujin . So if you’re facing in the right direction, you could jump…”
Before Smith could finish his sentence Hart jumped, using the traveling rope for leverage, and after a forward propulsion in slow motion, his helmet came to rest against the hull of the Ryujin with a resounding thump.
“What was that?” Smith asked.
“My brains getting rattled.” Hart moved his hands along, feeling for the bilge keel, the fin-like projections from either side of the hull that helped stabilize a ship in rough seas. He cast his light directly on the hull and found he could see somewhat better. Hart’s thin gloves allowed for greater movement, but also meant he’d be more prone to cuts and scraps against jagged metal. He proceeded with caution moving down and around the bottom of the hull, alert for sharp metallic pieces of the ship’s frame.
After several dim minutes, Hart’s glove snagged on a sharp object. He trained the light in its direction and found a hole, about fifteen inches wide and half as long. He reached his hand in, feeling the emptiness of the space where the oil used to be and shuddered. The boulder, or whatever it was, had ripped a hole right on a seam of the hull, a faulty one at that. Hart’s eye followed the rip in the hull until it dissolved into blackness. He pulled out an underwater tape measure and after ascertaining the width, proceeded down the length of the hull looking for the end of the rainbow. Eight and a half feet later, the gaping stopped. Now it made sense. Hart had been wondering how in the hell so much oil had come out of what he was thinking probably looked like a small gash in the bottom, given both the pilot and captain’s descriptions of impact. With a small hole and entrainment, most of the oil would have stayed put while the ship was moving. But this was no small hole. The impact had given way to a split seam on the hull. With a hole this size, no matter how fast the ship had been going, the oil was coming out. Zenone was right: time to retire the single-hulled vessels. The expense to the company was nothing compared to what it was doing to this river. He’d talk to Bicky about it as soon as he got back. Bicky would have other ideas, but he’d never been on Site for a major oil spill either….
“Hey, Boss.” Smith’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Time to come home. Coast Guard just issued a squall warning. They want all ships and other non-necessary personnel out of the water, pronto.”
“I can’t see a damn thing anyway, got so much oil on my face-plate,” Hart said. “I’m on my way up.”
to be continued. . .
click here to see what led to this state of affairs
copyright 2012
don’t do anything rash
read::write::repeat
ten feet of water
OIL IN WATER
Pam Lazos
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Three hours later, the Sea Witch’s belly had gone from four to fifteen feet below the water line as a result of its recently acquired load while the Ryujin sat that much higher. The deck hands fastening the fendering back to her side looked to Captain Reed to be no bigger than children. The Sea Witch was off, already moving upriver, while Captain Reed paced the deck, waiting impatiently for the arrival of the river pilot who would steer the Ryujin up the Delaware to the Marcus Hook refinery. The pilot was late and lateness was something Reed could not tolerate.
“Company, sir,” the first mate called.
A small water taxi, likely bearing the river pilot, was arriving. Captain Reed didn’t think much of river pilots on the whole, thought them a lazy lot, their navigational skills gone slack from disuse as a result of gliding back and forth on the same body of water – the epitome of a big fish in a little pond – but the law said that only the river pilots could take a ship upriver. The company that serviced the Delaware was run by an old codger named Lars Andersen. He was smooth and weathered like driftwood back when Reed met him fifteen years ago and despite his prejudices, Reed had come to like the man over time.
Captain Reed ceased his pacing to watch the water taxi’s approach. It pulled up close and tight to the Ryujin and a young man of about twenty-five reached for the rope ladder hanging down her side. Reed frowned and moved in to get a closer look.
➣➣➣
The water taxi bobbed on the water while Pilot Christian Anderson stood watching the swell of the waves, looking for an opportunity. The Ryujin rocked and jumped with the swell of the rising tide. The taxi was at optimal height and Anderson had a split second to decide: he grabbed for a middle rung of the rope ladder, Jacob’s ladder, and pulled hard. He threw one leg around the outside rope and hooked his foot inside a square. He grabbed another rung with his free hand just as the sea tossed the water taxi and the deck fell away. Anderson held on with ease, suspended along the side of the Ryujin , his strong, well-tuned muscles tensing and flexing under his own weight as he climbed the thirty-odd feet to the top. He swung over the side of the supertanker, dropping effortlessly onto the deck, and looked into the face of mocking disapproval.
“Who are you?” Captain Reed barked.
“Pilot Christian Anderson. At your service, sir.” He bowed his head slightly.
“Christian Anderson? Where’s Lars?”
“Dead,” Anderson said, watching Reed’s face. The eyes changed, but the face did not. No way of telling whether the Captain was friend or foe of his father since the man had equal amounts of both – one either loved or hated him – or whether he knew Lars even had a son. “Any other questions?” Anderson asked. Reed took a step back to better appraise Anderson.
Christian Anderson had been a pilot for about thirty-three seconds. Actually it had been three years, but only three weeks since his father died and he took over the family business. So far, he hadn’t been able to lose that sick feeling in his stomach that sometimes came with the weight of being in charge. He’d played the prodigal son for so long that he couldn’t get used to this new appellation. Still, that wasn’t information he was about to be offering up, especially not to this dickbag standing in front of him looking all smug and holier than thou. He’d had a hard enough time convincing the other half a dozen pilots his father employed that he was up to the task of running the business, and not into the ground , as he had heard them prognosticate under their collective breaths. This business would flourish in ways his father never had the foresight to allow. They’d see. They’d all see. Then he’d have something to flaunt. He gave Reed his own forthright appraisal, looking him over like a prized heifer. Reed’s icy glare forced Anderson to turn his own face away as if stung.
Anderson pulled out a small brown leather case and flashed his pilot’s badge, then shoved it back in his pocket; Reed put a hand on his arm to stop him. Anderson narrowed his eyes at the Captain, but pulled it out again, handing it to Reed for examination. Reed examined the license then the man himself before handing it back.
“He was your father then?”
Anderson searched Reed’s eyes for some glint of emotion, and finding none, figured it was simple curiosity that asked the question. Anderson nodded.
“When did he die?”
“Three weeks ago.”
Captain Reed made a small gesture, a slight nod of the head, turned on his heel and walked away. Whether it was meant as an offer of sympathy Anderson couldn’t tell. He stared after Reed in mute astonishment, his delicate, Swedish features turning momentarily to granite. And as the Captain turned the corner, Anderson decided it prudent to follow and sprinted after Reed.
➣➣➣
Hours later, the moon rose above the horizon at what might be considered warp speed in moon terms, bulging and engorged, a result of the last rays of the sun’s refracted light. As she climbed, she lost that overstuffed pancake look, shrunk down to normal size and simply became the moon once again, that giant, floating orb of light and beauty that possessed the mystical ability to control tides and sway men’s hearts.
Anderson, his hands set tightly on the joy stick, cast a glance up at the sky and relaxed his grip. To his right and behind stood Captain Reed, so close to Anderson’s shoulder that he could hear the man breathing although to Anderson it sounded more like a wheeze. The noise and Reed’s sheer proximity were unnerving.
“You know, you should have that looked at,” Anderson said.
“Pardon me?”
“Your lungs. It sounds like your breathing underwater.”
“I’d thank you to mind your own business .” Reed emphasized the word business and Anderson’s shoulders tightened. He couldn’t stop thinking about the messy state his father had left it in.
“I’m going down on deck for a few minutes. Try not to hit anything,” Reed said and left.
“Dickbag,” Anderson muttered. It was only a hundred and two-mile stretch of river from the Bay to the Marcus Hook refinery, but already Anderson knew it was going to be the longest hundred miles he’d ever traveled. And by night, no less. The thought sent a shiver up his spine.
Had he been given his way, the Ryujin would have waited until morning to depart, but the tide had reached high water mark and was on the way down and the Sea Witch had already taken off upriver. Reed had wanted the Ryujin to follow as soon behind as the Coast Guard would allow to take advantage of the extra draft room the high tide would provide. He was pissed, that bastard, that Anderson hadn’t taken off right away, but Anderson was adamant about inspecting the ship, acquainting himself with all her innermost workings. With so few solo trips under his belt and a business on the line, he couldn’t afford any screw ups. Mostly so he wouldn’t appear lackadaisical and just to shut Reed up, he agreed to leave when his inspection was complete. Unfortunately, by that time it was twilight.
Anderson came from a long line of sailors and sea captains, a nepotistic bunch of Swedes, brothers, uncles, and cousins who were all active in the business Anderson’s father had inherited from his own father. During early childhood, he spent many nights curled up in a sleeping bag at his father’s feet as his Dad piloted a ship upriver, listening to the low rumbling vibration of the boat, the last lines of his father’s bedtime story resonating in his ears. Except that those stories were much worse than the usual macabre of the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson. His father’s stories were of sailors lost at sea; of monsters with terrible fangs and breath like fire; of mermaids that grabbed unsuspecting sailors off their ships and bore them down to their watery graves; of the sirens, lovely creatures that lured men too near the rocks with their songs and laughed as the waves bashed their ships against them, leaving the hapless sailors to drown in the melee. The stories had delighted and enchanted him and Anderson would look up to catch a last glimpse of his father standing behind the wheel, smiling at him as his child’s eyes became heavy with sleep.
Anderson’s head bobbed, touching his chest. He opened his eyes and for an instant, he was a boy again. He came to full consciousness, shocked with the realization that he had fallen asleep at the helm. There was no telling if it had been seconds or minutes. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, then shook himself like a wet dog, dispensing the sleepiness that had settled on him like drops of water. It had been three weeks since he’d had a good night’s sleep, haunted as he was by visions of the giant of a man he’d loved so in life.
He felt a hand on his arm and turned, half-expecting to see his father. He saw Captain Reed instead. Reed said nothing, the scoundrel, just turned and stood off to the side, staring out into the blackness in front of him, his hands clasped behind his back, the picture of urbanity. Anderson cleared his throat to break the silence and cast a glance back at Reed, the asinine bastard. He saw the Captain’s face out of the corner of his eye, baleful and unwelcoming. He glanced at the radar screen. The next three channel markers were well lit.
“So how long have you been a Captain?” Anderson asked. Safe ground.
“Longer than you’ve been alive,” Reed retorted.
Anderson rolled his eyes and puckered his lips, blowing air out slow and silent. The air in the control deck felt thick and clogged in sharp contrast to the breezy conditions on the river. Anderson moved his head from side to side, stretching the muscles in his neck. As the silent minutes ticked by, his mind drifted to his father’s last months when the Alzheimer’s had him fully in its grasp. How time must have blended together for him; his stubborn refusal to retire, even in his lucid moments. Was time really not linear, as the physicists said, and even more absurd, all happening at once? That one would wreak havoc on the history books.
Reed spoke, but Anderson missed what he said so Reed cleared his throat.
“Excuse me?” Anderson said.
“I said how long? Until we drop our load. How long?”
“What, you got a date?”
Reed didn’t even crack a smile, just gave Anderson a stultifying glare.
Anderson harrumphed. “A few hours give or take. It’s slower going at night.”
“I notice you don’t use the radar much,” Reed said.
“I use it as backup.”
Reed’s eyebrows shot up in query.
Anderson gave Reed a half-smile. “I’ve been traveling this river since I was a boy. I can tell you where every rock and shoal lies.”
Reed made a small grunting noise that originated in the back of his throat, and strode over to the radar screen. A light blipped on and off signaling the presence of something buried well below the surface out of the path of the Ryujin . He grabbed the weems plotter, a fat ruler with wheels, placed it on a line and rolled it down making a compass angle.
Anderson laughed.
“You think using a chart is funny?”
“Just laughing at the hardware.”
Reed raised his eyebrows, scanned the desk chart and then at the blinking radar screen. “What do you think that is?”
“Nothing to be alarmed about?”
“How do you know?”
“The GPS says we’re right where we need to be,” Anderson said. “There’s nothing at that particular juncture big enough to cause injury to his boat.”
Reed snorted. His voice was so sedate that a small shiver ran up Anderson’s spine. “When was the last time you were on this river?”
“Three weeks ago.” Three weeks ago, Anderson’s father had died suddenly while at the wheel of a ship very similar to this, leaving his son to sort through the mess.
“If you know anything about rivers,” Reed said curtly, “you’ll know the last thing they are is static. Things change. How do you know that a boulder hasn’t rolled, or wasn’t just missed in the plotting, or a school bus didn’t drive off the side of the road and is now parked in our path, waiting to tear a large, gaping hole into the hull?”
Anderson sighed. “I don’t. But regardless of that nice little speech you just gave, river bottoms don’t change all that drastically. Besides, the Army Corps is always dredging this part of the river to keep the silt down so the channel stays open.”
A wry smile formed in the corner of Reed’s mouth; he turned back to the chart. “Under the Coast Guard regs, you might be temporarily in charge of this ship, but remember this, son,” Reed said. “I’m the Captain. Before, and long after you’re gone.” Reed eyed the blinking radar screen. “What’s that?”
Andersen checked the screen and scanned the dark horizon. He saw nothing. “A small speed boat, maybe? Or a fisherman still out on the water.” Thanks to Reed, he was growing a little nervous himself. The blip on the radar screen moved erratically, not a stagnant boulder half-buried in the sea bottom, that was for Goddamn sure, but something, and admitting it to this truculent son-of-a-bitch made him queasy.
“There’s been nothing reported in the last week,” Anderson said, trying to maintain an air of calm about him. “As far as the Coast Guard and the Corps are concerned, we’ve got ten feet of water between us and the bottom of the river. We’re riding anything but light. But we’ve still got the residual benefit of the flood tide even though it’s turned.” He glanced out the window at the bank of the Delaware and gave silent thanks for the red buoys. Red right returning . As long as the buoys were on the right, they were safely in the channel. He shook his head, trying to cast off the vibes of impending doom that Reed was scattering about the cabin like wildflower seeds and stole a glance at the imperial jackass as he moved the weems plotter over the nautical charts, its wheels squeaking like baby mice.
“Man, would you knock it off? You’re creeping me out.”
Reed gasped. Anderson turned in time to see Reed lunge at him. Reed tossed Anderson aside and wrenched the joy stick from his grip, and with it, the direction of the ship, slowly altering its course by forty-five degrees. But before Anderson could react, they heard it. The sound started out low, like a hum, and grew in volume until it became identifiable. A small water craft. The speed boat raced by and they both looked out the window in time to see the stern of the motor boat disappearing from view; the laughter of its occupants left behind, floating on the breeze.
“Goddamn kids,” Reed said.
A feeling of de ja vu overtook Anderson and he entered a place where time was no longer linear. He knew more than a few seconds had passed because the sound of laughter, mingled with the small boat’s engine, had receded into silence, yet he couldn’t say how long that took or what had transpired in the interim. He regained his presence of mind and looked to the river for reorientation. The buoys were on the left!
“Jesus Christ.” By instinct Anderson grabbed the joy stick, shoving Reed aside, and cut it hard, aiming the ship back into the channel. She turned slowly on her axis, a planet caught in the gravitational pull of her own sun. She spun slowly, a giant arcing whale, then resumed her forward motion, course righted. Anderson breathed a sigh as they passed the buoys on their way back into the channel. But relief was short-lived.
It was no more than a slight jolt, what one might feel when riding on a train whose tracks needed tamping.
“What the hell was that?” Reed demanded.
Anderson looked out at the river as they were clearing the buoys, then to the radar screen. Something was blinking, and he had just run over it, or through it, depending on what the hell it was. He rubbed his eyes, but the blip was still there. The two men eyeballed each other.
Anderson cleared his throat. “Why don’t you go check the water off the stern and see if we’re dragging anything,” he said. “The moon’s almost full. Should help you to see.”
“What the hell would we be dragging?” Reed sneered, his voice rising. “You hit something.”
“You mean we don’t you.” The palms of Anderson’s hands were beginning to sweat on the wheel, but he retained his outward demeanor.
“No, I mean you. You’re the pilot of this ship and…”
“And if you hadn’t thrown us out of the channel…”
“…if I hadn’t steered us out of the channel, we would have had a head on collision with a motor boat,” Reed bellowed, spitting as he did. His face had taken on a crimson hue and his eyes were bulging giving him a toad-like appearance. “And somebody would have probably died you stupid, idiotic…”
“That boat,” Anderson said, “was playing chicken with us, and you know it. A bunch of kids out joyriding. They knew enough not to take on a thousand foot ship. Trust me. They would’ve blinked.” Anderson was sweating now from the rush of adrenaline and sheer nerves.
“Go check the stern, dammit,” he barked at Reed.
Reed hesitated momentarily before scrambling out the door giving Anderson time to collect his thoughts. He reviewed the charts and saw what he was dreading. There, just outside the channel, was the topside protrusion of a large boulder that had likely been in that exact same position since the dawn of time, the kind that originated somewhere around the core of the earth and kept twisting and rising until it reached the top with just its tip peeking out. The sneaky kind. The kind that sunk the Titanic.
A shiver of fear ran down Anderson’s spine. It’s nothing. A small jolt is all. We bounced right off her. He gripped the joy stick tightly and clenched his teeth. He knew what a “small” jolt meant to a ship of this size and the kind of damage a boulder could do to a single-hulled vessel. The Ryujin was well past her prime, and although she paid lip service to the Coast Guard regulations, her body worked and reworked a dozen times trying to keep her up to the current safety standards, she stayed afloat not because of strict compliance with the law, but because of some damn grandfather clause. It was the lawmaker’s fault. A single-hulled ship had no business carrying millions of gallons of oil, yet it was done all the time since, the ship owners said, the cost to retire her and build a new doubled-hulled ship outweighed any potential environmental damage that a spill would cause. And the law said that until 2015, ship owners could continue to sail single-hulled ships no matter how many dead fish floated to the surface covered in oil.
➣➣➣
Captain Reed appeared half an hour later, looking flushed from exertion, but otherwise in good spirits, his normal dour countenance having momentarily shed its pinched expression. Anderson took this as a good sign.
“What d’ya find out?”
“Nothing,” Reed said. The briefest of smiles crossed his lips. “There is no damage to this ship.”
“You’re sure?” Anderson watched the man’s face carefully. After all, he didn’t know Reed from Adam, and now Reed held Anderson’s career between his two damn fingers.
Reed nodded. “Engines are all in working order, we’re not dragging anything, and we’re not leaking anything.”
“No sheen on the water? You looked?” Anderson asked. Reed nodded again. “How many times?”
“Three,” Reed replied. “Once at the beginning of my inspection and once at the end. And once in between. The oil is safely in the hold.”
Anderson nodded, uncertain. Whatever Reed may be, it was obvious he was a Captain foremost. He would not take kindly to any untoward incidents on the Ryujin while under his command although Anderson dimly suspected that Reed might be more concerned with the integrity of his ship than that of the Delaware River. Still, Reed’s environmental ethic was not Anderson’s concern right now. He sighed and looked out over the bow and beyond to the horizon hidden by night. Nothing much he could do but take the man’s word for it.
“Alright. Let’s get this baby to bed before she suffers another nightmare,” Anderson said. and bent to the task.
➣➣➣
The full moon was all but eclipsed by the stratus clouds that stretched out, in full battle regalia, across a winter sky. An occasional break in their ranks gave the casual observer the tiniest peek at the moon’s frothy demeanor, but the blaze of light she heretofore sent streaming down river before the Stratus’s moved into the neighborhood was gone, gone, gone. Too bad, too, for the fish, birds, flora, fauna, and various species of plankton that thrived in the river because they were about to get a rude awakening. Thirty feet below sea level, a ten-inch gash ripped through the hull of the Ryujin by an errant boulder had begun to widen, resulting in the unfortunate release of the contents of the ship’s hold into the river. The seemingly small quantity of oil leaking out at any given moment would, hours later, add up to one of the worst environmental disasters ever experienced on the Delaware.
On deck, the crew, Captain and Pilot of the Ryujin were oblivious to the danger. As they headed north, the oil headed south and without the moon to light her stern-side, the crew would not see so much as a flicker of a sheen on the black night waters.
Of course, the Stratus’s did not move into town alone. They brought with them the North Wind and He, coupled with the outbound tide, pushed that pure, Arabian crude down, down, down toward the Bay, catching the whole hundred-mile stretch of that beautiful river unaware.
to be continued. . .
to get up to speed with what happened before start here
copyright 2012
Slaughter Beach, Delaware
PART TWO
The Delaware River, the longest un-dammed and only remaining major free-flowing river east of the Mississippi also lay claim to the largest freshwater port in the world. The river flowed three hundred and thirty miles from Hancock, New York and made a pit stop in the Delaware Bay before spilling out into the Atlantic Ocean. It served as the dividing line between Pennsylvania and New Jersey and serviced twenty million residents of the New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia-area with drinking water. Washington’s famous Christmas Eve ping-ponging across the Delaware began and ended on the banks of the river at Trenton, New Jersey. But the river’s abundance wasn’t limited to battles, boundary lines and the provision of potable water. She was a dichotomy in uses: heavy industry drew on her for its needs as did bald eagles and world class trout fisheries. As evidence of the latter, about one hundred and fifty miles of this magnificent river has been included in the U.S. National Wild and Scenic Rivers System.
In the late 1800’s, approximately one million Philadelphians lived within the boundaries of America’s third largest city which boasted the second largest port in the country located in the Delaware Bay. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the entity charged with assuring the river’s safety, dipped its long, federally-funded fingers into a bevy of construction, flood control, and navigational projects designed to improve, among other things, the river’s navigability. In 1878, before Philadelphia had electricity or the telephone, sixteen hundred foreign trade vessels arrived a year, and six thousand coastal trade vessels docked in the river’s port. Trade vessels gave way to supertankers: today seventy million tons of cargo arrive in the river’s waters each year. From sails, to steam, to the supertankers, the Delaware River and its Bay have lent their banks and waters to the growth of the interstate and international commerce of not only Philadelphia, but the nation.
At its deepest point, the Delaware was only forty feet deep which meant the river couldn’t abide a thousand foot supertanker between her banks. Roughly the size of three and a half football fields and bearing three million gallons of oil or other cargo, a ship of that size would have forty foot drafts, the depth which the boat sits below the water line, and in the Delaware’s case, deep as her most navigable channels. Low tide, which causes the water levels in the tidally influenced channel from the Delaware Bay to Philadelphia to drop as much as eight feet, would leave a thousand foot ship incapacitated, floundering like a beached whale.
The Corps of Engineers began its first deepening project in 1855 when the depth of the Delaware stood at eighteen feet. The Corps dredged down to the current depth of forty feet during World War II and maintained this depth by periodic dredging and removal of silt buildup in the channel to the tune of about 3.4 million cubic yards a year. Since 1983, the Corps has studied the feasibility of dredging the Delaware’s main shipping channel down to forty-five feet to better accommodate the world commodities market by making the hundred and two mile shipping route from the Delaware Bay to Camden, New Jersey more accessible.
To do so, the Corps would need to remove about twenty-six million cubic yards of silt and sediment from the river bottom and continue removing another 862,000 cubic yards every year thereafter. Cost notwithstanding – the Corps estimates original construction costs at $311 million, of which the federal government would pay approximately two-thirds – the Corps needed a place to put all that sand, clay, silt and bedrock. Six federally owned sites have been identified for placement of the initial construction material, some of which will go toward wetland restoration and beach front protection. The Corps believes the project would result in safer, more efficient vessel loading and transit as well as reduced lightering costs. However, environmentalists have concluded that the possible detrimental effects – those to drinking water, aquatic and bird life, and potential contamination from the disposal of dredged material – outweigh the benefits. That story – small town need vs. corporate greed; environmental stewardship vs. environmental recklessness; the rights of the few vs. the rights of society – has been around since the dawn of creation, told and retold a million times in as many different ways and, because of constraints of space and time, is a story best saved for another day.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The Ryujin dropped anchor at Big Stone Anchorage at Slaughter Beach, Delaware in the mouth of the Delaware Bay. The “parking lot” in the Bay was crowded this morning with a dozen supertankers waiting to offload their cargo onto barges that would take the goods upriver to Marcus Hook or Philadelphia Harbor or Becket Street Terminal in Camden, New Jersey. Once offloaded, the supertankers were light enough to make the trip upriver themselves. Some had been waiting as much as a week while tugs and taxis cruised back and forth, bringing food and supplies to the waiting supertankers, crisscrossing the Bay like a checkerboard and leaving white caps in their wake. The great ships were parked far enough apart to allow them to spin on their anchors, a necessity when considering the vagaries of the weather. From the air it looked like a mechanical ballet: dozens of ships turning and gliding on their axes, a synchronized dance brought to life by the formidable forces of wind and tide.
The Ryujin traveled from the Arabian Gulf and had been parked in the Delaware Bay for the last week, awaiting the offloading of a million gallons of its crude oil onto a barge which would make it light enough to navigate the Delaware’s forty foot channel upriver to the Akanabi refinery in Marcus Hook. While waiting, the Ryujin took on skid loads of food, supplies and mechanical parts sufficient to tide her over until arrival at the next port. And since the suppliers were not interested in receiving credit for these transactions, the Ryujin carried vast quantities of cash to pay for those stores as well as armed guards to protect it. The ship’s superstructure housed a three-story engine room, a machine shop, steam turbine and diesel engines, a mess hall, living facilities for her Captain and crew, and a single cat who relished the job of keeping the mouse population down. Where the mice came from was anyone’s guess given that the ship had spent the last three weeks at sea.
Beside the Ryujin sat the Sea Witch , an engineless barge about the third of the size of the Ryujin , but with considerably less girth. Motored by The Grape Ape , a seventy-five foot, single-screw, diesel-powered tug boat, The Sea Witch sat, waiting to remove a million gallons of elemental crude oil from the Ryujin and shuttle it up the Delaware River channel for her. Afloat on a tidally influenced body of water, both boats were subject to the fickle, yet predictable, moods of the moon.
Named for the Dragon King of the sea, an important Japanese deity said to have the power to control the ebb and flow of the tides with his large mouth, the Ryujin wasn’t living up to its name today. It seemed that the ocean, the Bay, the moon and the tides were all in cahoots, as the Ryujin spun on its anchor at the wind’s ferocious insistence and the Sea Witch tried to make amends.
The process of lightering was a tricky one. Not only was there the danger of an oil spill during the transfer, but if the tanks were drained one at a time in order, a Captain would have a highly imbalanced keel on his hands, the bow of his ship rising higher into the air as each tank was emptied, a potentially disastrous event for a vessel whose primary need was balance in the water. Therefore, the Captain took great pains to ensure that the oil was skimmed off the top of each of the tanks in a controlled fashion, draining some from one tank, moving on to the next, and back and forth in this manner until the process was completed.
Captain Heston Reed was barking out orders like a man possessed. After several hours of trying and dripping with the emotional and physical strain of the task, there was nothing he could really do until the barge, the Sea Witch had tied on, an event which, despite tidal fluctuations was imminently close to completion. The fendering bumpers which consisted of a large piping structure encapsulated by dozens and dozens of tires, the gestalt of which worked like a ball bearing in between the two vessels, were lowered into place, the black scrape marks from previous lightering operations still visible on both ships. With the fendering bumpers properly lined up, Captain Reed gave the command and the Sea Witch’s crew tied on to the Ryujin , latching on to the hip of the Ryujin’s stern like a newborn to its mother’s bosom. The giant mooring ropes creaked and groaned as the crew cranked down on the winches pulling them tightly into position. Satisfied that the ships were happily married with no visible gaps in between, Captain Reed signaled the operator of the Sea Witch and gave the go ahead to his own crew. The crew began the arduous process of lowering a dozen twelve-inch round, rigid rubber pipes down some twenty-five feet onto the deck of the Sea Witch . The pipes were attached by cables to small cranes. The cranes swung them into place enabling the deck hands to make the mechanical connection to a screw coupling which was part of a larger manifold system on the deck of the Sea Witch and which fed into the barge’s holding tanks. The deck hands inserted the pipes and, using a special wrench and the sheer torque of their body weight, screwed the couplings fast. The rubber pipes originated from a similar manifold system on the deck of the Ryujin and once Captain Reed and the Sea Witch’s operator were satisfied that all mechanical connections were secured, the transferring, or lightering process could begin. Captain Reed personally checked each of the connections. The individual pipes were hooked to another, larger pipe so the ship and barge operators could control, via computer, which tank would give and which tank would receive the oil.
Captain Reed gave the signal and the Ryujin began offloading its crude, the oil flowing from its holding tanks through the manifold system and into the pipes that would carry it down to the Sea Witch’s manifold system. The rigid rubber pipes lurched forward as the sudden thrust of oil was released. Frank Charlton, the manifold operator, sat in the control house on the barge electronically directing the distribution of oil into the various holding tanks and taking great pains to keep the ship’s balance.
“Alright?” Captain Reed stepped into the computer room to ascertain for himself the integrity of the operation. There’d be hell to pay if someone made an error on his ship. Charlton nodded and turned briefly to acknowledge his superior officer. Captain Reed took a deep breath and the corner of his mouth twitched, but he did not smile.
“Let me know when it’s done then. I’m going to see about the pilot.”
“Yes sir, Captain,” Charlton replied without taking his eyes off the computer screen.
to be continued. . .
to get up to speed and read what came before, take a giant leap here
copyright 2012
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Thanks to Simonet7 for nominating Persephone’s Step Sisters for the Inspiring Blogger Award. We are so happy, we are blushing!
To comply with the rules of nomination, we are providing the following information, here are seven fact about Cynthia, followed by seven facts about Pam:
- West Coast, baby!
- This morning I woke with the lyrics of a song in my head
- I am a vegetarian not because I am philosophically opposed to eating anything with a face, but because I prefer not to dose myself with steroids and antibiotics
- I believe (rightly or wrongly) that coconut water makes me faster at Scramble
- Thanks to Gonzaga U and Mills College I am a certifiable smarty-pants
- Numerologically, I am 5 personality, and an 8 life path
- There is the possibility I could be mistaken for Susan Sarandon
- East Coast resident; West Coast in my soul
- Some day I’d like to meet Steven Spielberg and ask him to teach me what he knows
- Family first
- I prefer a beach and a good book to just about anything else there is to do
- Spending time in nature rejuvenates me while writing balances my soul
- Sometimes I prefer the dream space to waking reality
- I need some form of exercise everyday, otherwise I’m loopy
We herewith nominate the following bloggers for this wondrous award:
outside looking in
JOURNAL THAT
a guide to writing
Cynthia Gregory
Jounaling works if you’re just a baby writer and not sure where it’s going or what you want from it. Journaling works if you’re a seasoned writer and you need something to keep your writing muscles toned when you’re not working on a project. It’s even good when you are working on a project and need an avoidance tactic that can still work to your benefit event while you’re avoiding working on the actual thing you promised to do. What you may not know if you’re new to writing, is that there is nothing like an assignment or writing goal to make you think of all the things you’d rather be doing at that moment than actual writing.
You might think you’re the first to experience the avoidance factor, but no way, Auntie Mae. You can’t believe how sparkly clean my house becomes when I’m on deadline. And it isn’t that you don’t want to write, it’s just that sometime a writer needs to focus on something else for the ideas to become clear. You know how when you try really hard to remember something, like maybe the name of your third grade teacher, you can’t? And then the minute you let it go, it just floats up through your mind like a leaf in a stream: Miss Gerber.
Sometimes taking a break works. Other times, you just need to plant your tush on the seat cushion and write. One day I realized that I became bored with my own voice when I journaled. Granted, I bore easily – but hardly ever where my writing is concerned; good, bad, or mediocre. Nevertheless it began to seem . . .familiar. This of course is what happens when everything starts with me.
It all began to sound the same: I see, I feel, I want. I found that my writing was starting to become labored with too much “I.” This was troubling, especially since writing is almost always fun. I wondered what was up. Then, I developed a method that added some zing to my narrative and my journaling hasn’t been the same since.
You don’t eat the same food every day, and you don’t wear the same clothes, right? It’s important for the human spirit to express itself creatively – otherwise, we would all be dull as rocks. But we’re not. There is an infinite variety all around – from the stars in the sky to the blossoms on a tree. Variety is the pickle juice of life. And the nectar, and the sweet cherry on top. It seems completely logical, requiring no leaps of faith whatsoever, that if you enjoy variety in your non-journaling life, that your journaling process might benefit from mixing it up too.
It’s very true that you need guidelines in general writing and in journal writing too, because if there were no rules and guidelines, there would be complete anarchy and no one would know what anyone else was trying to say. I’m not advocating that you give up structure at all. The same rules apply to journaling that apply to any good writing, and this is as it should be. There are the rules of punctuation, grammar, and sentence structure. A system is necessary, or your journal becomes complete gibberish, and that serves no one, least of all, the journal-ist in you. But it’s possible to add variety to your method, one tweak at a time. So if you suspend one element, everything else stays in place and a sort of balance is achieved and your journal entries still exhibit a sort cohesive read-ability. You may have heard that good writers break rules. But here’s the truth of the matter: they know the rules they’re breaking. They’re not just randomly committing bad writing to the page and calling it creative.
So here’s a very cool way to add variety to your writing, to maintain a certain creative flexibility to your narrative without sending all the rules up in smoke: change your point of view. This doesn’t mean change how you essentially look at life (though that sometimes leads to a creative breakthrough), but it does mean that you get out of your own head. You look at a situation not from your dearest, most precious vantage point; you step aside and consider it from a slightly different angle.
I’m not sure when but at some point in time, I found that I could increase my interest in writing exponentially, when I changed my point of view from first person to second or third person. I began to refer not to “my thoughts” but “her thoughts.” She did this, and she said that. Suddenly, ZOOM! I felt a shift of perspective that allowed me to view my journaling as something not so intensely personal, and therefore allowed me to the freedom to go writing on a tangent if I felt like it. It allowed me the freedom to drift from my life up close, to a view of some one’s life not unlike my own, but because of the distance, it was infinitely more interesting. I became a voyeur in my own life. It sounds like crazy-talk, but it works.
Sometimes feelings are too intense to embrace. This is why people get addicted to a million things: yoga, chocolate, sour apple martinis, you name it. Anything to put a buffer between our hearts and our heads, because otherwise, life is just too real to deal.
I discovered that if I wrote “she came to the conclusion that she had to fire the boyfriend” it pinched a little less, and by the way, made for some slightly juicy “fiction.” We can split hairs about what is “memoir” and what is “made up,” but that is a debate that’s been raging for centuries. Really. And all fiction is at least marginally revisionist memoir at its most basic level. So what if you make your journal slightly fictionalized? Does it really matter? If it helps you get to the heart of what’s bugging you about what your sister said, or the fact that when you opened the door for the plumber expecting a soiled tee shirt and three day stubble but found instead Adonis’s younger and slightly hotter brother, slide that narrative into third-person and start writing.
Shifting point of view allows you to explore themes and ideas from a slightly higher vantage point, and so allows a roominess to enter into your writing that might just allow you to spread your wings and soar.
persephone's step-sisters 